Archives

• 3 Tips to Improve Your Connection Strings

  Sep 30 2011 10:43 AM

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  Due to some database moves, I’ve recently been touching a lot of connection strings, which has me thinking about the topic.  In fact, I put together a short survey on twitter, and invited a bunch of developers and DBAs to share their thoughts, both on twitter and in the survey, on some issues relating to connection strings.  Here are three tips you should know about that, if you’re not already using, should improve your use of connection strings.   Use Windows Authentication (if you can) By far the biggest tip I can offer is that you should be using Windows Authentication.  You can find this guidance directly from Microsoft, when they discuss Choosing an … more

• Speaking at DevReach 2011

  Sep 30 2011 9:42 AM

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  I’m very pleased to be speaking again at DevReach in Sofia, Bulgaria next month.  As usual, the conference has an amazing list of speakers (which I’m still somewhat amazed includes me), with Scott Hanselman making the trip out this year to give several sessions.  If you have the opportunity to attend, I highly recommend it.  There’s certainly no other conference in Eastern Europe that comes close. This year, I’ll be presenting on three topics.  The first is something new for me.  I’ll be co-presenting with Richard Campbell of DotNetRocks on Performance Tuning ASP.NET – Stories from the Trenches.  For this session, Richard and I are each going to share some of … more

• Cleveland 2011 Software Engineering 101

  Sep 30 2011 8:30 AM

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  Next Friday, 7 October 2011, Microsoft in Cleveland is hosting a free one-day event focused on the basics of Software Engineering.  There are a handful of seats left before the event sells out.  You can learn more and RSVP for Software Engineering 101 here (until tickets run out).  The event is being held at the Microsoft office here: Microsoft Corporation 6050 Oak Tree Blvd Independence, OH 44131 Last year, the event sold out (well, “sold” is misleading, since it’s free), and it’s on track to do so this year as well.  Here’s some more information, from the event’s home page: This is a one-day, FREE event designed to improve your software development … more

• Wiring up an AutoCompleteBox to a JSON Service in Silverlight

  Sep 23 2011 6:17 AM

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  I’m currently building an internal application for The Code Project that needs to be able to transfer the contents of some potentially very large files over the wire.  After considering various ways to get the data from point A to point B, we decided the easiest thing would be to process the text file on the client, and send batches of rows up to the server for processing.  Initially we looked at building a WPF client for this, but then switched over to Silverlight 4 since the rest of the application is web-based and we didn’t want staff to have to worry about a separate standalone application. Basically the files get translated into simple lists on the server, so the UI simply … more

• Set JsonRequestBehavior to AllowGet

  Sep 23 2011 4:58 AM

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  If you’re working with ASP.NET MVC and JsonResult, you may encounter this error: This request has been blocked because sensitive information could be disclosed to third party web sites when this is used in a GET request. To allow GET requests, set JsonRequestBehavior to AllowGet.Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code. Exception Details: System.InvalidOperationException: This request has been blocked because sensitive information could be disclosed to third party web sites when this is used in a GET request. To allow GET requests, set … more

• Bidirectional Entity Foreign Key Names in EF Code First

  Sep 22 2011 12:01 PM

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  Ran into a small problem today, where I had two classes referring to one another using EF 4.1 Code First.  Let’s say I had a class Item and another class ItemHistory.  ItemHistory has a property of type Item that refers to the Item class.  Item, in turn, has an ICollection<ItemHistory> Histories property:  public class Item { public int Id { get; set; } public virtual ICollection<ItemHistory> Histories { get; set; } }   public class ItemHistory { public int Id { get; set; } public virtual Item Item { get; set; } } In my DbContext OnModelCreating() I have some code like this … more

• WinRT and the Paradox of Choice

  Sep 22 2011 8:33 AM

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  In my recent analysis of the Windows 8 / WinRT options for building Metro style Apps, I mentioned the many choices Microsoft is offering for building these applications.  While I agree with Microsoft’s decision to support C++, .NET, and HTML5/JS developers when building these applications, it does still represent a Paradox of Choice for many developers, myself included.  If we consider only native apps for the iPad, there are far fewer choices involved when it comes to programming language and platform (effectively there is only one choice, or as my daughter Ilyana likes to tell me “One choice is not a choice!”).  Recently, a fair number of high profile companies (such as … more

• Analyzing Windows 8 and WinRT

  Sep 19 2011 2:46 PM

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  Last week at BUILD, Microsoft introduced their vision for the next generation of Windows devices with announcements and previews of Windows 8, Metro style applications, and WinRT.  The BUILD conference was the most secretive event I’ve ever known Microsoft to hold, with very few leaks prior to the keynotes that began on Tuesday, September 13th.  Now that the event has come and gone, you can watch the sessions and keynote presentations for yourself here.  In this post, I am going to offer my own analysis of the event and its announcements, with what I view as some of the strengths and weaknesses of Microsoft’s strategy, and the threats and opportunities it creates.  I’m … more